Welcome to the Twitterverse

I am now on Twitter. Find me here. The start of a new blog, a new iPhone, and this Twitter business over the past week has led to some major changes in my life. If there was ever a time when I was a digital Luddite, it was clearly in the past. I’m very excited about these changes, but I wonder how being more “connected” will change the ways in which I process information or if it will alter the limits of my attention span. I want to keep up with what’s happening in the world, but I don’t want to be that dude doodling on his phone all the time. I’ve already found myself in a few situations in which I didn’t catch what someone was saying to me because I was preoccupied with my phone. I don’t like that.

In class tonight I remarked that I felt that the media misled me about Twitter. Anytime Twitter makes the news, it’s because someone famous did something dumb with it. At one point I took this elitist view that Twitter was somehow below me, something not worth my time. Just a bunch of people speaking jargon and hashtags to each other. Yet a brief perusal after creating my account has shown me that there are in fact many cool things going on that are helping to facilitate communication between professional historians, students of history, and the broader public. #twitterstorians is one of many examples of an effective Twitter network that I’ll be keeping an eye on in the future. I really regret not joining in on the fun sooner and will have to work to try and find my place in this new digital landscape.

I’ll be posting tweets whenever I have a new blog post at Exploring the Past. Stay posted and stay classy.